How Do Bees Make Honey? From Flower Nectar to Honeycomb

Step 1: Foragers collect nectar

Honey starts as nectar, a sugary liquid that flowers produce to reward pollinators. Nectar is mostly water, often well over half, with sucrose, glucose and fructose dissolved in it. A forager of the western honey bee sucks it up with her long tongue and stores it in her honey stomach, also called the crop, an expandable bag in front of the true stomach.

A single trip may take the bee to dozens or even hundreds of flowers before her crop is full. A valve separates the crop from the gut, so the bee can keep the nectar for the colony and only draw on a little for her own fuel. Some bees also collect honeydew, the sugary droppings of aphids on trees, which bees turn into the dark “forest honey” of central Europe.

Step 2: House bees receive and process it

Back at the hive, the forager does not store the nectar herself. She regurgitates it to one or more younger house bees, called receiver or food-storer bees, in a mouth-to-mouth exchange known as trophallaxis. How quickly she finds a receiver even tells her whether the colony needs more nectar or is overloaded.

The receiver bees add enzymes from glands in their heads:

The receiver repeatedly brings a droplet out between her mouthparts and draws it back in, exposing it to the warm air of the hive for around 20 minutes. This starts the drying and mixes in the enzymes.

Step 3: Bees dry it by fanning

The partly processed nectar is then spread in thin layers in empty cells of the comb, often only part-filling them so the surface is large. The hive is kept at about 35 °C (95 °F) near the brood, and workers stand at the entrance and on the combs fanning their wings to push a current of air through the nest. The moist air leaves the hive and the nectar slowly thickens.

Drying is the slow part. Depending on the weather and the nectar, it takes one to several days for the water content to fall from more than half to roughly 17–18 percent. On a busy summer evening, beekeepers can often hear the roar of fanning bees and smell the nectar from outside the hive.

Step 4: Capping the cell with wax

When the honey is ripe, bees fill the cell to the top and seal it with a thin cap of fresh beeswax. Workers make this wax themselves, from four pairs of glands on the underside of the abdomen. Capped honey keeps almost indefinitely: its low water content, high sugar content and acidity stop bacteria and yeasts from growing.

Bees place honey above and around the brood nest in the upper part of the comb, close to the cluster that will need it in winter. Pollen is stored separately, packed into cells near the brood as bee bread.

How much honey does a bee make?

One worker makes far less honey than most people expect. A commonly quoted estimate from beekeeping organizations is that a honey bee produces about one-twelfth of a teaspoon in her lifetime. A summer forager usually lives only a few weeks, and spends the last two or three of them collecting, which is explained further in how long bees live.

Another popular estimate says that to make 0.45 kg (1 lb) of honey, bees together visit around 2 million flowers and fly a distance equal to about twice around the world. These are rough figures, but they show the scale. A strong colony in a good season can still store 25 kg (55 lb) or more beyond its own needs, which is the surplus beekeepers harvest. Bees need much of their honey themselves: a colony in a cold climate may eat 20 kg (45 lb) or more over one winter.

Why does honey taste and look different?

Honey’s flavor, color and texture come from the plants the bees visited. Clover and acacia honey are pale and mild, buckwheat and chestnut honey are dark and strong, and heather honey is so thick that it sets like jelly. Honey with a lot of glucose, such as canola or dandelion honey, crystallizes within weeks, while honey high in fructose stays runny for longer. Crystallized honey has not gone bad; it can simply be warmed gently.

Do other bees make honey?

Only honey bees and some of the tropical stingless bees store large amounts. The 500 or more species of stingless bees of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia keep honey in wax-and-resin pots, and people have harvested it for centuries, for example in the Maya region of Mexico.

Bumblebees, including the buff-tailed bumblebee, store small amounts of nectar in wax pots, enough for a few days of bad weather. Their colonies die out in autumn, so they have no need for a winter store. The great majority of the world’s roughly 20,000 bee species are solitary bees that feed their young on a ball of pollen and nectar and make no honey at all.